A English Science book following the Thai cirriculum

I sat today looking at one of the books I picked up in Malaysia last year for science.

A very small book but of a very good quality - total cost 9 ringets or 90 baht. Not much colour but clear and easy to follow with good experiments set out and a free cd with it for the student so they can make an e science journal and look at examples on the disk.

WHy can't the THai government produce something like this then?

Instead the authorise the publication of books in Thai which do not have a large part of what should be in the NT3 test - just looked through my students NT3 test guide and saw stuff which I do not have any knowledge of is not mentioned in any text book.

Yes I have the same problem with mathematics. At one stage, I got the school to pay my wife to translate some stuff from a Thai text book (prathom science, that I was teaching at the time).

It seems that getting a complete copy of the thai syllabus in english is tough, let alone a book in english. Its surprising that EP's and bilingual schools have been running for almost 12 years, and noone has even bothered to write books in english that follow the Curriculum. It just goes to show that these programs are just for show. It would seem to me that the lack on information provided to EP's is deliberate - maybe the govenrment wants these programs to fail..who knows?

Added after 1 minutes:

also there are some great books for science (in English) from India. They have maths books too, but the units are different. What the hell is a chore or lak anyway?

Last year, the best our 'MEP' manager could do is the Singapore textbooks, which of course didn't follow the Thai curriculum.

Are the NT3 tests administered to Thai students at a certain grade level? Why should the test materials (or the test prep booklet) have any correlation to the curriculum, or to anything else? That's too logical. Final exams apparently test the students on material that was never covered during the year.

When I'm cynical (which is most of the time, now ), I think it's not just the EP or the Bilingual Programmme that's just for show. It's the entire 'educational system' in Thailand. Are there any famous Thai scientists or mathematicians, any world-famous Thai grammarians of English or Thai, any academically first-class anythings?

If you can get a full-sized American or British textbook it will usually cover all the areas you'd need (if not in the right order). But if your school would order these for the students, you're probably working at a place that's rich enough that many of the problems are not so big, anyway.

"Steven"

"Teachers, we are having some technical problems with our PA system. If you are having any difficulty hearing this announcement, please send a student to the main office to let us know."

I agree with the original poster - I teach science and maths and getting a curriculum more than two sentences long is impossible.
And I get the same curriculum for more than one Matayom.

Had a representative from the ministry tell us that there are 67 EPs being run in govt schools which means that parents are spending millions of baht. Surely the govt could produce meaningful curriculums.

I am always worried that I am teaching either too little or too much for many of the subjects....and don't tell me to talk to the thai teachers, its been tried and it doesn't work.

The 'MEP manager' asked little old, non-scientific ME to translate the Thai science curriculum (which was a piece of manure to begin with) into English. I couldn't recall the differences between meiosis, mitosis, and halitosis. Even when we translated the equally manure-ish Thai math curriculum for M1, we had terrible translation problems. It didn't matter, anyway. She gave me the wrongly-paginated Thai text, and said it covered the entire year; it only covered the first semester, and was unusable. It took weeks to get the Sinaporean texts, which were much better, but still weren't that good, and were in conflict with the curriculum. Mess upon mess.

It must be better elsewhere than in a certain province that's best known for 'L' such as longan, lamyai and ladyboys.

Got given the translation of chapter titles from a non-english speaking Thai science teacher that didn't help me a bit. Main idea seemed to be teach ALL of biology and then all of chemistry and then all of physics - 1 year for each.

Went and bought a selection of books and looked through them. Most seemed to have OK science, but the only one with slightly simplified English and lots of pictures was the Longman Exploring Science series, which follows a British syllabus.

I don't really know what's in the thai syllabus, but I had to wrire my own syllabus and I basically followed this series of books - they actually supply a syllabus if you can get hold of the teachers guide (our school can't or won't for some reason)

Longman (the bastards) decided to change these books around this year. Originally in a book 1,2 + 3 series they have become book 7,8 + 9 of a larger series and bits have been missed out and added - which makes it confusing some times (basically it is assumed the students have already studied books 1 thru 6, which they haven't!)

Anyway, as far as I know i'm the only person in the school with any idea of the curriculum and I just follow the books and make other things up as they come to me.

I'd think the British syllabus would be better than the Thai one, wouldn't it!?!?!
Or why would people pay stupid money to go to international schools?

No, we worked an extra week for 3 years so our school could get brownie points with MOE for developing the Bilingual curriculum (and the MOE reps could stick to doing what they do best-wearing silk, avoiding whites, shrimp buffets in the office, and nit picking the semantics of lesson plan templates they approved that became usless as they insisted on no lesson steps or vocabulary sections).

:sad:

It's time to get things started on the muppet show tonight.....................